Non-Apocryphal Ode to the Calypso
Dancers of the Apocalypse
(after “Gavage”, by Revolutionary
Poet Dian Sousa)
The
day came when God finally threw down
the
all-seeing telescope and thundered,
“That’s it! Again, they’ve gone too far!
We’re cleaning up that cesspool!”
“Yo!”
God bellowed to Buddha, who was nearby,
“Summon
the angels, the saints, the cherubim, etc.,
and tell them to bring their weapons!”
“Yes,
Sir! Yes, Ma’am!” the legions of Heaven
bugled,
sang, trumpeted, murmured, or,
in
the case of the cherubim, burbled.
Yes, Sir? Yes, Ma’am?
Indeed: God
is
not He and/or She, but He/She.
Yes!
Unctuous homo-lesbo-trans-bi-fearing
Fascio-Christians,
God is hermaphrodite,
either
and both. Not to mention, when He/She feels like it,
a
swan, a lion, an eagle, a snake,
or
your neighbor’s Chihuahua
barking
all night. Sometimes God can be
petty.
But
we digress.
“We
need not enumerate their sins,”
God
intoned solemnly. “We know.
They
know. The willfulness, the greed,
the
carnage. And now, while children perish
from
starvation, abuse, or their inane parents’
guns,
we have this creeping, pernicious,
self-righteous,
mean-spirited idea
that
it’s OK to be a bastard, that WE
want
them to be asshole mother-raping
father-torturing
baby-killing “martyrs”,
or
politicians, which is pretty much the same thing,
or
weapons-toting neighbors making house calls.”
“What’s
the plan?” demanded
the
celestial cacophony, as
God
thundered,
“First, shut down the Internet;
second, neutralize all weapons;
third, send a series of targeted
hurricanes, floods, droughts,
and plagues – of locusts, or
hummingbirds, or nail salons,
just long enough to do serious
damage,
but not end it. Yet.”
Pausing,
Gods took a big swig from
the
milk-and-honey fountain. All that
thundering
is hard on His/Her throat.
“And
then?,” squeaked the cherubim,
caroled
the angels, hissed Lucifer’s minions
(who
had been summoned and pardoned
on
the premise than many worse things
were
happening on Earth than in Hell),
murmured
the saints, and so on.
God
conferred with Him/Herself.
“We
need some prophets,
some
community organizers,
some
angels brave and foolish enough
to
get their wings dirty.”
**************************************************************
“Here’s
what you do,” God rumbled
to
the volunteers. “Plant some ideas –
about
cooperation, altruism, empathy,
self-reliance,
taking responsibility for
your
own life, and losing without
throwing
a tantrum. Then watch, and wait.”
Whoever
emerges on the side of the angels,
literally,
encourage them. Give them whatever
help
you can. If you need a little
intervention –
a
rainstorm, a low tide, a brace of oxen
eager
to pull a plow, say a prayer. Loudly.”
“BUT,
when you find those
inevitable
insects out for power
or
money or sexual exploitation,
mark
an X on each one’s forehead.
Make
it look like a tattoo – they like ink.
Those
people are so egotistical, they’ll
believe
they’re the chosen.
And
so they are, but not
the
way they think.”
And
so it came to pass that
angels
walked among us, recognized
us
for what we were, and helped us,
or chose us, as they saw fit.
At
the end of that millennium,
the
angels summoned all
citizens
of the world
to
Celestial Celebrations,
to
be held at sacred places
of
the earth.
As
the people assembled,
no
X-rated persons were seen.
They
had simply vanished.
But
there were still many
dodgy
characters, who were
provisionally
included on the basis
of
pleas from family and friends,
or
wily lies, or bribes.
As
a crowd, this fringe group was
paler
and more testosterone-riddled
than
the majority, but every human
group
was represented. Greed never
sleeps. Rapacity knows no color or
gender,
etc.
Then
the music began,
the
steel drums, the marimbas,
the
gourd rattles.
It
was irrestible.
“Form
up a line,”
angels
cried in bell-like tones,
as
heavenly bugles blared the beat.
“We’re
dancing to heaven –
this
place is toast. Storm coming.
BIG
storm.”
Raindrops
as big
as
Gods’ tears splashed down,
the
skies parted and a golden highway
(or,
yes, Dorothy, a yellow-brick road),
rolled
right down to our pick-up point:
Avila
Road and the 101.
People
began to calypso dance
back
to back and belly to belly
up
the golden roads toward Everything,
just
as people were dancing upwards
from
Sedona and Krakov and Timbuktu
and
Varanasi and Pagan and
holy
places all over the globe.
They danced for hours,
they danced for days.
It rained for hours,
it rained for days.
Of course.
Just
as the last dancers shimmied
onto
the golden roads, just as
the
Irawaddy, the Ganges, the Nile,
the
Amazon, the Mississippi, and even
the
cement-stricken Los Angeles River
overflowed
their banks,
waters
chortling with greedy glee,
there
was a disturbance in the ranks
at
the Earth ends of the yellow roads:
the
fringe group, last to ascend, saw
other
roads, sinuous, black, shiny,
leading
down and down.
“Uh
oh,” said God.
“They
have a choice,” said God,
and
tootled his/her Kokopeli flute.
“Oh sinners, look here, other paths…”
At
the ends of the long, singing, dancing, lines,
fat
white CEO’s and multi-colored potentates,
dictators,
child-eaters, weapons dealers and
their
molls peeled off, to take the downward paths
to
the Bad Place. It seemed a better
choice.
No
pussy-whipped gender-crossing miscegenist
utopia
for them. Straight to Hell with their
guns
and
spears, machetes, rocket launchers, badges and name tags:
Hello,
I’m Dick Head,
Founder
and CEO of
We
Own Your Genome, Inc.
Better
Hell than ‘love thy neighbor.’
But
Hell was turned off.
No
ponds of boiling oil,
no
rooms filled with sulfurous gases,
no
razor banisters.
It
was all tidy and quiet.
(Lucifer’s
minions were nothing
if
not neat). Nonetheless, the unholy fringe
came,
they
saw. And then,
while
battling for dominion of Hell,
they
wiped themselves out. Ashes
of
their withered souls
clogged
up the River Styx for months.
No
angels wept.
In
fact, no angels noticed,
Because
things were hopping at
The
Calypso Apocalypse.
“This
is more like it,” God
said,
smiling as
S/He
shimmied to the beat.
“Sir-Madam,”
an intrepid
shamaness
from Guinea-Conakry
dared
to ask, “do you think
maybe
someday, you might
try
again, a new,
improved
human species?”
God
shook His/Her heads so vigorously
that
the ensuing wind flattened
five
miles of unperturbed dancers
and
parted the swollen Red Sea, again.
“Not
for a long, long time,”
Gods
said. “Party on!”
No comments:
Post a Comment